1391–1492: A Third Renaissance in Sephardic Religious and Intellectual History?

In his recent book, Mark Meyerson seeks to revise the master narrative of Hispano-Jewish historiography according to which Jewish life in Spain after the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 was a tale of almost unmitigated woe. By demonstrating that Spanish Jewry's final century was “an era of remarkable resurgence” -- nay a “Renaissance” -- Meyerson challenges the longstanding vision that see 1391 as the beginning of an inexorable slide towards the Spanish expulsion of 1492. In making his case, Meyerson focuses on renewed political stability, enhanced economic prosperity, and an amelioration in social circumstance. My paper examines ways in which recent scholarship on Sephardic intellectual history affords glimpses from this ostensible period of decline of a third “Renaissance” in the religious and intellectual history of premodern Sephardic Jews as well. The first two Hispano-Jewish Renaissances are well-charted. There is the multifaceted “golden age” of Andalusi Jewry during the 10-12th centuries which yielded new and influential achievements in such fields as linguistics, poetry, and philosophy, and a second phase of religious-cultural attainment beginning at the turn of the thirteenth century in Christian Spain that is most famous for its mystical efflorescence and the of Kabbalah's canonical text, the Book of Splendor (Sefer ha-zohar). Taking into account new Jewish awarenesses of, and increasingly Jewish appreciation of, Christian achievements in various domains, my paper examines how recent studies centered on rabbinic literature, sermonic practices, philosophy, and biblical scholarship may allow us to speak of a third, admittedly more modesst, Renaissance in premodern Sephardic intellectual history after 1391.